Julia voss hilma
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The Unfinished Reception of Hilma af Klint
IN THE GERMAN ART CRITIC Julia Voss published the first biography of Hilma af Klint (–), the Swedish originator of European abstraction. Titled Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen, a difficult-to-translate phrase lifted from af Klint’s writing that I might tentatively render as To Astonish Humanity, Voss’s page account is the result of more than a decade’s research that included teaching herself Swedish. A bestseller in Germany, it is written in Voss’s welcoming, patient, and sparing style. Voss spent countless hours in af Klint’s archive, making her way through tens of thousands of notebook pages and sketches, and the biography bears traces of its author’s long suspension in this mass of journals, papers, and illustrations. Her sentences possess a fascinating exploratory quality, continually pondering the possible meanings of af Klint’s remarkable oeuvre—a corpus of paintings and drawings produced “mediumistically,” sometimes via collaboration with a collective of female friends—which seems to have been at least a decade ahead of modernism elsewhere in Europe. It is likely that the runaway success of Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen has much to do
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In this episode, Risa gets to interview the primary biographer of the first abstract expressionist artist, Hilma af Klint.
We talk about collaboration between women and spirits, we talk about taking what Hilma tells us of her experiences seriously, we talk about the beauty of her vision, we talk about reaching our feelers out to continue evolving throughout our lifetimes, and beyond.
She develops this very pantheistic attitude towards what's around her. In the beginning you would always have these flowers in her paintings and you would have all kind of organic forms, but then she turns to actual flowers in her environment and tries to channel their souls. And succeeds.
Transcript Julia Voss - Put Your Feelers Out
[] Risa: The Missing Witches podcast is brought to you by The Missing Witches Coven. Our coven mate, poet, Sun, said.
"I came to this coven because nobody else was centering mutual aid and informed resistance like the Missing Witches, but this community is also hugely loving and supportive and full of artists and thinkers and healers who have such a huge diversity of experience.
Even when we're not in circle, there's magic afoot. Also, I have a chronic illness, which makes it really hard not to swear all the time, so I am in fabulous company here. B
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Hilma af Klint
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